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JJ’s Bohemia
231 MLK East
Chattanooga, TN
37403
(423) 266-1400

5$, 21+

It’s gonna start a little early, like in the evening.
Also, there may be one or two more bands.

BBQ?

1. Somedays When
2. Grace Palay
3. Sell Your Ass
4. Straight As An Arrow

January 12, 1997

Rain of Cash In Car Crash Tempts Poor From Miami

At first, Faye McFadden thought there had been a terrible accident. People were running everywhere, shouting, looking at the ground and picking things up.

Just then, a man ran toward the bus in which she was riding.

”He yelled that there was money falling out of the sky,” Ms. McFadden said on Friday, recalling the incident Wednesday morning in Overtown, one of Miami’s most impoverished neighborhoods. ”Everyone jumped off the jitney — even the driver.”

It was not, as it turned out, manna from heaven.

The bounty that rained on Northwest 17th Street came from a Brink’s truck that had crashed on an overpass above the neighborhood. Part of its $3.7 million load — bags stuffed with bills, food stamps and thousands of rolls of coins — flew out of the armored truck, tumbled down an embankment and into the eager hands of passers-by and rush-hour commuters on Interstate 95. At least $500,000 is still missing.

On Thursday, the Miami police gave holders of the money 48 hours to turn it in without being charged with theft.

By the time the amnesty expired at noon today, only three people had returned any money, one of them Ms. McFadden, who took $19.53. Another was a firefighter who responded to the crash, found a 50-pound bag under a bush and handed it to a police officer without knowing it contained about $330,000. He said later he would have done it anyway.

The third was Herbert Tarvin, 11, a sixth grader at St. Francis Xavier Elementary School, who gave 80 cents to his teacher.

”We’re delighted with the small stuff, but we’re more interested in the big bills,” said Lieut. Bill Schwartz, a police spokesman. ”We’re looking for the guys with hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

By today, the police had arrested three people. On Thursday, Florida Highway Patrol troopers detained Charles Smith, 25, and charged him with trespassing, resisting arrest and battery on a police officer after he was found at the site with a metal detector and ignored warnings to stay away.

On Friday night, in a Biscayne Boulevard supermarket, the police arrested two women — Phyllis King, 36, and Marcia Scott, 37, a Dade County Department of Corrections employee — with $8,000 worth of food stamps and about $2,000 in cash. The police believe they had already sold a large quantity of food stamps for profit. They were booked on suspicion of dealing in stolen property.

Police said at least 100 people had picked up some money, but there may have been many more.

”We recognize the moral dilemma people are in and we wanted to give them time to think about it and do the right thing, but so far that hasn’t really been the case,” Lieutenant Schwartz said.

Brink’s spokesmen have not said where the money, which was insured, was bound or to whom it belonged.

Lieutenant Schwartz said officers had heard that some of the windfall was already being redistributed. .

”One man grabbed a considerable amount of cash in a bag, took it to his house and threw it in the living room,” Lieutenant Schwartz said. ”Then he ran back to the scene to scoop up some quarters — I guess he needed to do a lot of laundry — and when he returned home his house had been burglarized.”

A woman who had appeared on television boasting of how rich she had become entrusted the money to her boyfriend, neighbors told the police. ”When she came home, he had moved out, lock, stock and barrel,” Lieutenant Schwartz said.

The debate about whether it was proper to profit from the accident has raged ever since scenes of the chaos appeared on local television. It is an issue all the more poignant in a city struggling with a $68 million budget deficit and allegations of malfeasance and mismanagement at the highest levels of local government.

For Ms. McFadden, a single mother of six who makes $5 an hour as a sales assistant at the Burdines department store downtown, the guilt of hanging on to the few coins she plucked from the street was too much to bear.

”My heart wouldn’t allow me to keep the money,” said Ms. McFadden. ”It wasn’t mine.”

Others felt no such scruples. ”We deserve a little something,” said 18-year-old Gus Flagg, who lamented that he was asleep at 7:25 A.M. when the accident occurred. ”It landed in people’s yards, man. What do you expect them to do?”

For Joe Clein, a bail bondsman who has run his business from the neighborhood since 1961, there was an element of justice.

”I don’t know which is more moral,” Mr. Clein said, ”to return the money and leave your children impoverished, or maybe send them to college and enrich the family for generations. It’s hard to feel sympathy for the insurance companies when you live in grinding poverty.”